Doctors and nurses from New York and Utah fought COVID-19 together last year. How are they feeling now?

Health care workers from Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare traveled to New York City to give some needed relief to the medical staffs at New York-area hospitals in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic patient numbers were at one of their highest. | Intermountain Healthcare

A year after a group of Utah doctors and nurses answered the call for help from New York City hospitals, then the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines are offering hope that the worst of the battle against the deadly virus is behind them, but there are still concerns as the country moves toward fully reopening.

“I think we were all looking for a miracle. We were all hoping for something to come save us from this pandemic. That is certainly how I felt when I was in New York,” Whitney Hilton, an Intermountain Healthcare intensive care unit nurse, said during a virtual reunion Friday. “The vaccine, to me, is that miracle.”

For Madison Montague, a cardiothoracic ICU Nurse at Northwell Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, choosing optimism versus trepidation a day after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city will “fully reopen” for business on July 1 is a “tricky question.”

But Montague, who worked side by side with Utahns to care for COVID-19 patients, first in New York City in April 2020 and again several months later in Salt Lake area hospitals as part of a New York team that traveled to Utah as cases surged, also is putting her faith in the vaccine.

“This was a really horrible time filled with things that we never thought would happen, so it’s hard for me to totally say, ‘Yeah, I think we’re on the up and up and I’m ready to move on.’ But that being said, for the first time in a very long time, I am feeling hopeful. Our vaccinated numbers are going up,” she said.

Intermountain Healthcare

Health care workers from Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare traveled to New York City to give some needed relief to the medical staffs at New York-area hospitals in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic patient numbers were at one of their highest.

“I’m hopeful and I’m looking forward cautiously,” Montague said, especially since her parents just received their final dose of COVID-19 vaccine. “I think that as long as we continue to really care for each other as humans and do what’s best for everyone, things will keep getting better.”

This time last year, there was little reason to believe that could happen.

New York City was hit harder than any place in the world in the early days of the pandemic, with nearly 300,000 virus cases and more than 18,000 dead by the end of April 2020. The toll overwhelmed city morgues, and bodies had to be stored in refrigerated trucks, often parked outside hospitals.

Utah has had a total of just under 400,000 COVID-19 cases to date since the start of the pandemic more than a year ago, and the state’s death toll reached 2,202 Friday as five additional deaths were reported, including two that occurred before April 1 of this year.

“To be honest, I was absolutely terrified. I didn’t know what I was getting into. You hear horror stories about what could happen to a hospital,” Hilton said of arriving in New York City amid the crisis. She said when she arrived at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, “the first words that came to my mind was ‘this is a modern war.’”

Witnessing firsthand the devastation COVID-19 could bring was “very humbling,” Hilton said.

“Seeing is believing. I really felt like we were so fortunate to be able to see it from the inside and really believe what coronavirus could do to the community. I think that that was something on the outside, you just couldn’t believe,” she said.

The experience, Hilton said, made her realize she was “embarrassed at minimizing this pandemic,” since Utah had not yet seen its first surge in cases. Now, she wants to see the same trust in the science behind the vaccines as there was in health care workers at the height of the outbreak.

“Then I feel more and more confident about us moving forward,” Hilton said.

Dr. Dixie Harris, an Intermountain Healthcare critical care physician, said being “really in the trenches” in New York City a year ago helped the Utahns brace themselves for what was to come, including overcrowded ICUs and the loss of a longtime respiratory therapist at Utah Valley Hospital in Provo to the virus.

Harris said she came away from her stint in the New York City hospitals “just understanding we can ‘man up’ for this. We can do this. And reckoning back to the kind of a can-do attitude, this really positive attitude,” the New York health care providers had.

Later, Harris told the Deseret News she has “big trepidation” about what might be coming next from COVID-19, something she’s felt since first seeing how the new virus ravaged the bodies of patients in New York City a year ago.

“When I went and saw what that virus could do to a community, you know it really is scary. I use the word scary and then I would say this virus is a cruel virus. I came back with, we have to pay attention. This is not just any virus,” Harris said. “Afraid of the virus? Yes.”

Intermountain Healthcare

Health care workers from Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare traveled to New York City to give some needed relief to the medical staffs at New York-area hospitals in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic patient numbers were at one of their highest.

Utah COVID-19 numbers

Friday, the Utah Department of Health reported 338 new COVID-19 cases, and a rolling seven-day average for positive tests of 378 per day, with 5,903 Utahns taking tests for the virus and 12.091 tests conducted since Thursday.

That puts the rolling seven-day average for percent positivity of tests at 3.5% when all results are included, the method used by the state to help determine transmission levels, and 6.6% when multiple tests by an individual are excluded. There are 145 people currently hospitalized in Utah with the virus.

The five deaths reported Friday are a Salt Lake County woman, 65-84, hospitalized at the time of her death; a Utah County woman, 65-84 and a long-term care facility resident; two men from Utah County and Salt Lake County, both 65-84, and hospitalized at the time of their death; and a Davis County woman older than 85 and a long-term care facility resident.

New York City is already allowing more indoor seating in restaurants and bars, and Utah is set under a new law to end nearly all restrictions as soon as the state reaches 1.63 million first vaccine doses, likely in mid-May, as long as case counts and hospitalization rates stay low.

Harris said over the past month, she’s seen an increase in COVID-19 patients at the Provo hospital, including more who are younger and on a ventilator. Although the vaccines are available to everyone 16 and older, only just over 20% of Utahns 16 to 29 are fully vaccinated, meaning it’s been at least two weeks since their final dose.

Overall, Utah has administered 2,146,777 vaccine doses, a daily increase of 21,945 and about 40.5% of the population.

Intermountain Healthcare

Health care workers from Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare traveled to New York City to give some needed relief to the medical staffs at New York-area hospitals in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic patient numbers were at one of their highest.

‘This is not something to blow off’

“To me, it’s like, yes, we can open up. Yes, we can do things. But let’s be smart about it,” Harris said. She said she doesn’t know if people are already forgetting how bad the coronavirus is, but it’s clear they “are tired. They are fatigued. For me, the simplest thing is put a mask on.”

That’s her advice even for those who are fully vaccinated, since breakthrough virus cases are already showing up in Utah. About a third of the cases are asymptomatic, so someone could unknowingly be spreading the virus to others.

What’s happening in India, where a record-breaking 300,000 new COVID-19 cases a day have been reported in the latest surge, should serve as a reminder. But Harris, who also treats patients known as long-haulers who have chronic cases of the virus, said she’s seen many people don’t take the virus seriously until they’ve been stricken.

“‘I didn’t realize I could get this sick. I didn’t think this was this bad,’ how many patients have told me that? I’m just sad for them. That’s a very common story,” she said. “I tell them, ‘You have to go out and tell people this is not something to blow off. This is something that’s very serious.’”

from Deseret News https://ift.tt/3e6Se4I